After the extremely busy, early start days we have had the past two days, the boys practically cheered when I told them that we didn't have anything in particular to do until after lunch. I let them hang around the house in the morning. Then we walked around the Mercaz (center of town where the shopping is done). We searched for gifts for the siblings who didn't go on this trip. And rounded out our morning with some lunch followed by ice cream.
It was time to load the car for a short drive to Beit Guvrin. A gas station along the road was the meeting spot for our activity. We signed up to join the Archaeological Seminar Institute for the afternoon.
http://www.archesem.com/dig.asp They lead groups of primarily American families into the caves below Maresha to dig out remnants from the times of the Hashmonaim (the Greeks of the Chanukah story) . We drove past the bell caves that we had explored before to an active archaeological site.
Our guide Benji gave a very entertaining history of the area and the cave and a little bit of what we were going to see. We descended a steep staircase down into the very dust cave. The email information packets that they sent kept warning us about how dirty we were going to get, but some of our group didn't seem to believe it. One of the families with us consisted of parents, two older girls and a boy from New Jersey. The mother and daughters got down into the cave and refused to enter the dig sit because they were wearing $250 new boots and didn't want to get dirty. Who wears that to an activity that you know you are going to be sitting in dirt?
We were each given 2 buckets, a trowel and a mini pick axe. Our jobs were to loosen the dirt, check through it for pieces of pottery or bones (animal), coal, coins (rare) and anything else that wasn't a rock. Everything else, rocks included we were to scoop into the other bucket. We set to work right away. Pretty much with every turn of the dirt we found something. Lots of pottery pieces, tons of animal bones. I even unearthed an animals tooth! Some people found larger more interesting pieces, most pieces were basic broken chunks, but the archaeologists wanted it all. Benji pointed out markings on the wall showing us the dirt levels in the cave before groups like ours began. You can see how bucket by bucket group by group the cave is getting deeper. At one point he told us to stop and to combine the found items into one or two buckets sand to carry our buckets of dirt out.
Once outside we then had to be certain our buckets of found items didn't mix with the adjacent groups findings. We then took gigantic sifters and strained our dirt buckets picking out anything that we may had missed.
Next came a real treat. Benji lead us to a fully excavated nearby cave. It was lit by candlelight. We descended more steep stairs and passed through various chambers, sometimes ducking or even crawling. At one point he told us we had to enter what they referred to as a "toilet bowl". Basically it is a small double rimmed hole. You enter feet first and then put your weight on you elbows as you drop down and twist into the next room. Fortunately this cave has an exit so we didn't have to navigate back through the toilet!
The last part of our archaeological activities was a meeting in a tent going over how they know what we are finding, what they do with all of the things we find, what were some of the best things ever found etc.
After we drove back to the house, showers were in order (remember, it's a very dusty, dirty activity). We then continued on with our evening by meeting my sister-in-law and niece in the Modiin Mall (Azrieli) for dinner.
It is such a novelty to eat in the mall and go be able to choose meat or milk foods depending on your mood and not which restaurant we walked into. By the time we were done and got back to RBS it was about 10 pm.s
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